Why Not Being Invited to the Tea Party Sucks

I've written before about the Tea Party, basically to compare them unfavorably with hippies, but I realized something when I was hearing about last weekend's Tea Party Convention: I'm jealous. The Tea Party Patriots—or the “teabaggers,” if that joke is still funny to anyone—are a dissatisfied group outside the political mainstream who have organized themselves, however haphazardly, around a set of principles and have gained so much steam that they're nearly viable as a third fully-fledged political party. Agree with their ideas or not, that's pretty fucking impressive. For decades, the Greens, LaRouchians, Libertarians and Socialists have been trying to win elections and make the Democrats and Republicans afraid, and then a bunch of old white people from the South who listen to talk radio all the time get together and build a bona-fide populist movement overnight? To quote the internet, WTF?

The thing is, the teabaggers and I have a lot in common. I'm dissatisfied with the two-party system that dominates the country, I'm in favor of responsible spending and scaling back government whenever possible. Like nearly everyone, including Arianna Huffington, I'm not happy with the direction the country is going in, and I think the Democrats are incompetent. On top of everything, I've always wanted to be part of a popular resistance movement that overthrows the corrupt power struggle and defies the odds in a noble, almost cinematic way, just as the Saints did last Sunday.

Yet some of the Tea Party's positions and some of their practices are holding me back. So here's some suggestions for how they could win me, a 23-year-old New Yorker, over to their side.

#1: Promise to end the War on Drugs. It's hard to find a list of policy positions that the Tea Party actually holds, partly because there are many separate groups that form the “Tea Party,” some of whom are at odds with one another over all kinds of issues.But most groups are at least somewhat Libertarian, and they all agree that government should interfere with our lives as little as possible. And Sarah Palin, in her keynote address at the convention, mentioned “common sense,” whatever that means, a lot. So it should be a slam dunk to oppose the most nonsensical, most intrusive, bureaucracy-creating set of policies in the history of our country. Legalize marijuana and at least decriminalize the other drugs and you'd save money, collect a ton of money in taxes (that could reduce the deficit), open up a new area for legitimate entrepreneurs and small businessmen to exploit, and capture the much-prized pothead vote for a generation. And if the Tea Party adopted this as an official position, they would differentiate themselves from either party and broaden their appeal. (Also, “tea” is old-timey slang for marijuana.)

#2: Downplay the conspiracy stuff. If you spend much time poking around the conservative blogosphere, you run into statements like, “I hope and pray that we get the chance to vote Barack Hussein Obama out of office in 2012,” the implication always being that the United States is a couple of statues away from becoming a totalitarian society, when in reality all that happened is a left-of-center president supported a plan for government-subsidized (not government-run, the doctors would not be government employees) health care. When people compare Obama to Hitler or Stalin, it's like when Black Nationalists start talking about how the White Man is the enemy and needs to be killed—an irrational sentiment that makes outsiders think of you as insane, obscuring your legitimate concerns.

#3: Let go of the social issues. If the Tea Partiers were really in favor of keeping the government out of our lives and reducing government interference in private matters, they'd be pro-choice and pro-gay marriage, for much the same reason that they should be anti-anti-drug. Something along the lines of: “Hey, gay people? I think you're going to hell. What you do with your bodies is wrong, and I don't like your choice of music either. But as long as you don't have sex in front of my kids or try to suck me off when we're at the gym, I'm fine with you, since this is America and America is a mosaic of differences. If you can find a church that wants to marry a couple of sinners, fine, just know that it won't be my church. And lady? If you want to have an abortion, I probably can't stop you even by changing the laws. Just as long as it's not paid for with my tax dollars and you know you're going to hell too, it's fine with me.”

#4: Pledge to eliminate the government entirely. Interestingly enough, the platform of the Boston Tea Party is to “reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope and power of government at any level, for any purpose.” If you take this literally, it means that this one particular branch of the movement, at least, supports the complete elimination of government, which makes a lot of sense. Do these people really think that if they replace one group of politicians with another, slightly less polished group of politicians, suddenly everything will be all right? Or that if they elect Sarah Palin to the highest office in the land that she'll try something that no one has tried before and we'll be able to cut taxes, reduce the deficit, and spend enough money to make us safe from terrorism forever? Were they listening to the halftime show at the Super Bowl? The new boss is always the same as the old boss, and even Ronald “least gay man ever” Reagan increased the federal budget and tripled the national deficit. The only way to get the government to stop spending is to get rid of the government entirely. If the Tea Party wants to do that, they'll have my vote. Read more!

Why the Super Bowl Sucks

A few days from now, millions and millions of people will gather in front of their television set to watch a sporting contest that the vast majority of them have no stake in whatsoever. Some of them will have gambled on the game, some of them will be New Orleans Saints or Indianapolis Colts fans, but some of them can't tell a flea-flicker from a hail mary. For some people, this will be the only football game they watch all year. Snacks will be served, and excessive beer consumption will be tolerated at most gatherings, or even encouraged.

The Super Bowl is by far the most popular single-day sporting event in the United States, and it's become so ubiquitous it resembles a national holiday, with traditions of its own: the “Sexy” GoDaddy.com commercial, the Halftime Show with the Aging Rock Band, the Puppy Bowl, the Lingerie Bowl, and the inevitable Explaining the Game to the People who Don't Understand What is Happening.

It's hard to figure out how the Super Bowl became the consummerist orgy it is today. It has nothing to do with the quality of the football game itself, since historically, Super Bowls have been blowouts. Super Bowl viewership doesn't seem to correlate to high-profile match-ups (like the Patriots-Giants two years ago), since last year's contest wasn't exactly a dream matchup yet drew massive ratings. (it was Cardinals-Steelers, in a game you probably don't remember). The simplest explanation is that the Super Bowl became so popular by being popular.

Huh? Consider the commercials: once upon a time, companies bought ad time during the Super Bowl because millions of people watched the Super Bowl. Then they spent a lot of money making the commercials because it cost so much to get them on the air anyway, you might as well try to make a memorable one. Now there are people who watch because of the commercials (which seems less and less sane the more you think about it), which of course will improve the ratings, which will encourage more and more expensive commercials, and so on until we're living in an Idiocracy-esque world where there will be no football because no one is smart enough to understand the rules.

Then there's the phenomenon of the Halftime Show, which used to consist of a college marching band or two but gradually grew into a twisted version of a variety show—by 1993, things had gotten so out of hand that Michael Jackson performed with 3,500 children, which apparently didn't worry anyone at the time. The Halftime Show is a big event only because it is a big event—it has nothing at all to do with football. This year's performers, The Who, are English, so they probably don't even know what shape the ball is supposed to be.

The Super Bowl, as it exists today, is qualitatively different than the World Series or the NBA Finals or Wimbledon. Its purpose isn't to decide the champion of a sport, but to be such a big deal that every single US citizen will have no choice but to watch—hence the unnecessary halftime performance by a famous band, the two weeks of mind-numbing buildup, and all the other detritus that has nothing to do with football.

In truth, nothing about the Super Bowl has to do with football, except for that fraction of the broadcast when the game is actually going on. It's a bit like Christmas, which started out as a celebration of Jesus Christ's birth but is now a reason to buy things, spend time with our families, and watch animatronic movies about reindeer. And except for a few Christians who talk about the “War on Christmas” and would rather go to church than the movies, everybody is fine with that.

Well, I'm one of those people who, for whatever reason, sort of actually care about the football game. I'm not the only one. Do you think the Saints fans are going to enjoy having their lone title game interrupted for half an hour so the remaining half of The Who can work their geriatic way through “Won't Get Fooled Again?” Are the football nuts anticipating maybe the greatest Super Bowl quarterback match-up of all time going to get excited to watch the E-Trade baby vomit on itself?

What we need is to separate the Super Bowl from football. It will happen sooner or later anyway—by the time Super Bowl 100 rolls around (roman numerals will have been dispensed with because only a few intellectuals will understand them), we'll be telling our tube-grown grandchildren that the Super Bowl used to commemorate a football game, and that football was a sport that got banned for causing brain damage to all of the participants.

Let's fast-track that process. I don't look forward to the constant commercial breaks getting in the way of my football, and I bet there are people who don't look forward to the football breaks getting in the way of their commercials. I want to watch the NFL championship, I really do. I'm just not sure I want to watch the Super Bowl. Read more!

Why the Grammys Suck

I feel bad criticizing any awards ceremony, because televised awards ceremonies are so clearly bloated, self-congratulatory affairs that mainly exist to allow female celebrities to wear incredibly expensive dresses. The only people who really care about the Oscars, the Emmys, the Golden Globes, et al. are bloggers and critics who get outraged that Forest Gump won too many awards, or Radiohead won too few, or whatever.

The Grammys, however, are a special case. The Grammys are worse than useless—they're actively offensive. If you care about contemporary music, you almost certainly hate the Grammys, and for good reason. Take a look at this year's nominees and winners. There are a shit-ton of them, aren't there? I'll wait while you look through them.

Now, I bet you have some questions about that list--“What the hell?” for example. You might not even have known that Alice in Chains was still in existence, let alone a nominee for Best Hard Rock Performance. You may wonder why there are so many categories, including both “Traditional” and “Contemporary” Folk. You might not understand the difference between the Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year (here's an explanation for that one). You may be unsure what “Traditional Pop Vocal Album” means, although you may have a hunch it means “White.” Finally, you might not understand the difference between an R&B Song and a Pop Song, since Beyonce's “Single Ladies” won awards for being both. (By the way, did you know that it took four people to write that song?)

I don't want to turn this post into a bitchy laundry list of complaints about the individual selections. The Grammys poor taste is legendary, and for me to complain that The Black Eyed Peas are an embarrassingly stupid group that don't deserve to win Best Vocal Pop Album would be pointless. Let's just agree that every Grammy handed out could have gone to at least a dozen more deserving artists, and move on, okay?

But there's something fundamentally wrong with the Grammys' selection process that's worse than any individual poorly picked winner. Every artist who wins big at the Grammys—excluding the dozens of categories, like Best Native American Album, that no one cares about—is also one of the most popular. Do we really need to give awards to “Single Ladies” and The Black Eyed Peas? How is it possible that the best albums of the past year were also the most popular? Do the Grammy voters, whoever they are, basically grade a song on whether it sounds catchy and somewhat familiar, and if that's the case, why can't we replace them with a panel of randomly selected people? And if we did, would the results be any different?

Say what you will about the Oscars—and get ready for Avatar to sweep them this year—but at least some of their selections aren't also the highest-grossing films of the year, and sometimes a nomination or award draws attention to a movie that is better than it is popular. (How many people are going to see An Education now because it has the Academy's seal of approval?) The Grammys, on the other hand, just hand out awards to popular things. If the Oscars were picked the same way the Grammys are, Twilight: New Moon and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen would be Best Picture nominees; if we let Grammy voters elect the President, Glenn Beck would be running the country, with Nickelback as his Vice President. We don't expect much of awards shows, but at the very least they should have good, or at least defensible taste in whatever they're giving out awards for. No one has ever accused the Grammys of that.

But on the other hand, Imogen Heap did wear that Twitter dress, so she's got that going for her.

Grammy nominees. Read more!

Things That Don't Suck: Salinger's Death

Unless you've been living in an isolated cabin in New Hampshire, you'll have heard the news by now: J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, is no longer among the living. Like thousands of writers across several generations, I think of Salinger as one of my major influences, not so much for Catcher, but for his short stories and novellas dealing with the brilliant but troubled Glass family. (I used to read “Seymour, an Introduction” every year around Christmas as a cure for the wintertime blues.) In the four books he published in his lifetime (Catcher was his only novel) he demonstrated nearly perfect control of the English language; to borrow a phrase of his, his stories were “prose home movies,” precisely rendered portraits of movement and dialogue in which everything is in exactly the right place. “Omit needless words,” Bill Strunk advises us in Elements of Style, and Salinger shows us what that looks like.

But Salinger departs this world under rather odd conditions. He's not David Foster Wallace, dying at the peak of what should have been a long career, or Kurt Vonnegut, passing away after decades of critical and commercial success, or John Kennedy O'Toole, killing himself before his brilliance could be recognized. By all accounts, Salinger kept writing during his years of self-imposed isolation while at the same time refusing to let anyone publish or even see his manuscripts—now that he's dead, at least some of this work will see the light of day. Although a lot of his fans are in mourning right now, there's a lot of silver lining in this cloud: he lived to the extremely ripe age of 91, and now we'll finally get to see what he was working on this whole time.

It should be noted, too, that while the guy certainly had no obligation to publish books and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous publicity for the sake of a bunch of people he had never met, there was a nasty edge to his desire for “privacy.” Last year a Swedish author wrote a “sequel” to Catcher in the Rye that featured Holden Caufield and Salinger as characters; the book was banned in the US after Salinger cried copyright infringement. The book's publication wouldn't have affected Salinger's life in any way, yet he decided to fuck over a first-time novelist because apparently Salinger's characters and ideas are like precious jewels that he has to lock up in a cabinet and never let anyone touch. Years earlier a writer decided to write a sequel to George Orwell's Animal Farm, which was published as a “parody” over the objections of Orwell's estate, and guess what? It's a worthwhile novel that didn't diminish the value of the relevancy of the original in any way. (That might not be the case with the Catcher sequel, but still, it was awfully petty for Salinger to bring the suit.)

Then there's the case of “Hapworth 16, 1924,” the last of his stories to appear in published form. If you have a copy of the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker, you can read it, but thanks to Salinger's obstructionism, it never got anthologized or reprinted. It was nearly published by a small press until the Editor-in-Chief made the mistake of talking about it to a newspaper, which made Salinger very angry and he pulled out of a deal that could have helped a struggling press a great deal. There's the right to privacy, then there's screwing over people who just wanted to pay tribute to your work.

When I read Salinger, I don't give much thought to the man himself or his life, and that's probably the way he wanted it. He was a celebrity author who hated fame and never appeared to care about any of his fans, except the young women who he invited to live with him. I don't think I liked Salinger, the guy, at all. I just liked his sentences, and those, thankfully, aren't dying any time soon. Read more!

Why Democracy Sucks

People make terrible choices all the time. We purchase expensive things we can't afford, we drink too much and expose our genitals to a roomful of people, we eat General Tso's Chicken, we tape-record conversations in which we discuss breaking the law, even when we're the President of the United States—the list goes on. The real problem comes when we have to make really important decisions, like whether to go to war or what sort of health coverage the government should fund. You could try to find the smartest or most even-tempered person in the world to make those choices for you, but of course you then have to choose who the smartest or most even-tempered person is, which is another tough choice.

The solution we have come up with is called “Democracy.” The basic idea is we make the really important decisions together, by voting. People who like Democracy are operating under the assumption that large groups make better decisions, on average, than individuals—or, at least, decisions made by large groups are more “fair” than decisions that would be made by a dictator or a series of dice rolls.

If you're one of those people who believes in Democracy, I've got two words for you: Allen Iverson.

For those of you who aren't aware. Allen Iverson—or AI if you're in a hurry—is one of the best basketball players of his generation. He carried a not-very-good 76ers team to the Finals on his elaborately tattooed back, he scored so many points people ragged on him for not passing more, and he's a nine-time All-Star. The problem is he's about to become a ten-time All-Star.

For you non sports fans out there, the All-Star game is an annual tradition where the twenty best basketball players in the world get together and play basketball. It's a fairly non-competitive game and there's not a lot of defense being played, but it's fun to watch, if you like that sort of thing. Now, AI is averaging 14 points and four assists a game, which is better than you or I would do, but for a professional basketball player, those stats are the equivalent of almost but not quite passing health care reform. It's not like it's AI's fault that he's not as good as he used to be—he's 35 years old, young for a President but old for a basketball player, and he even flirted with retiring this year.

So why is he going to be an All-Star this year? Because All-Star starters are elected by fans, and while some fans watch a lot of NBA games and really pay attention to who the best players are this year, other fans vote for players that they like, whether or not those players are actually good, or even just for names that they recognize. That's how Tracy McGrady almost became an All-Star despite spending only 47 more minutes on an NBA court than I did this season. And an All-Star game with Tracy McGrady and AI involved would not be a game featuring the best basketball players in the world.

David Stern, the NBA commissioner, is no fan of Democracy and wants to “tweak” the All-Star voting process, much as Mussolini “tweaked” the Italian government. Stern knows that a lot of NBA fans are basically idiots, because what other word is there for people who would rather watch AI than Rajon Rondo because AI is more famous? Rondo will be an All-Star, but no thanks to Democracy.

I'm not saying we should elect a dictator or anything, but let's stop going around talking about how great and important Democracy is, and for God's sake let's stop trying to “import” it to places like Afghanistan. Democracy picks the wrong All-Stars, Democracy elects Presidents who shouldn't be Presidents, and Democratically-elected officials have done awful, awful things. The most you can say about Democracy is that the government moves so slowly and incompetently that it hardly ever makes things worse. Read more!